thoughts (and links) of a retired "social scientist" as he tries to make sense of the world.....

what you get here

This is not a blog which expresses instant opinions on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers as jumping-off points for some reflections about our social endeavours.

Thursday, March 30, 2017

In
the decade after the 1929 Great Crash, capitalism had been in such deep trouble
that its
very legitimacy was being questioned. Almost 90 years on, we seem back in the
same place….

The
destruction wrought by the Second World War, however, supplied a huge boost to
European economies - supplemented by the distributive effort of Marshall Aid and the new
role of global agencies such as The World Bank and the IMF – let alone the role
of American Capital… ….

In
Europe, Governments replaced key private monopolies with public ownership and
regulation; and earned legitimacy with social provision and full employment. The
“mixed economy” that resulted brought the power of unions and citizens into a
sort of balance with that of capital.

And.
by 1964, the British PM Harold McMillan expressed the ebullient European mood
when he used the phrase “you’ve never had it so good” – the growth of the core
European economic countries being one of the factors which encouraged the UK’s
membership of the Common Market in 1973 – although even then there were voices
such as that of EJ Mishan warning of The Costs of Economic
Growth (1967) and of…. The Limits to Growth (Club of
Rome 1972).

There’s anice little video hereof Charles
Handy reminding us of the discussions in which he participated in the 1970s
about the purpose of the company - and the casual way people such as Milton
Friedmann and his acolytes introduced the idea of senior managers being given
“share options” as incentives. Handy regrets the failure of people then to
challenge what has now become the biggest element of the scandal of the gross
inequalities which disfigure our societies in the 21st century.

It’s taken 25 years for the power of that analysis to be properly appreciated….

For the Common Good; Herman Daly
and John Cobb (1989) gave us a sense of how things could be organized
differently, Herman Daly
being one of the few economists in those days willing to break ranks against
the conventional wisdom…..

Then came the fall of
communism – and triumphalism. Hayek (and Popper) were wheeled out to inspire
central European intellectuals – I encountered so many well-thumbed copies of the
former’s (translated) Road to
Serfdom (written during the second world war) as I travelled around Central
Europe in the 1990s on my various projects …..

But,
by then, western academics were getting wise… .. and a deluge not only of
critiques but of alternative visions began to hit us….. I can’t pretend this is
exhaustive – but these are some of the titles which caught my eye over the next decade….

-
The
State We’re In; Will Hutton (1995); after Michel Albert’s book on different
sorts of capitalism, this was the book which showed us Brits what we were
missing in the Seine-Rheinish variant

argues
the case for “associational democracy” in both the public and private sectors.
It has a powerful beginning – The brutalities
of actually existing socialism have fatally crippled the power of socialist
ideas of any kind to motivate and inspire. The collapse of communism and the
decline of wars between the major industrial states have removed the major
justifications of social democracy for established elites – that it could
prevent the worse evil of communism and that it could harness organized labour
in the national war effort. Those elites have not just turned against social
democracy, but they almost seem to have convinced significant sections of the
population that a regulated economy and comprehensive social welfare are either
unattainable or undesirable

- Economics
and Utopia – why the learning economy is not the end of history; Geoff Hodgson
(1999)a clear and tough analysis by
a top-class economic historian of why socialism lost its way – and exploration
of what it will take for it to restore its energies. If you want to get a sense
of the range of arguments which have convulsed economists and activists over
the past century, this is the book for you – despite the dreadful academic
habit of supporting every statement with brackets containing 3-4 names of academics).

- The New Spirit of
Capitalism; L Boltanski and E Chiapello (1999). Surprising
that others have not attempted this critical analysis of managerial texts since
they tell us so much about the Zeitgeist…..these are mainly French (and a bit
turgid)….The only similar analyses I know are a couple of treatments of
managerial gurus by Brits (one with a Polish name!)….

- The Culture of the new
capitalism; Richard Sennett (2006) - who remains one of the few intellectuals capable of matching
Bell in the lucidity of their exposition (and breadth of reading) about social
trends…..

Tuesday, March 28, 2017

We’re
so overwhelmed by the mountain of books and blogs available about economic
issues that I’ve sought to give readers some
tests they can use on material they come across - to help them more easily
select the material worth spending time on……

One
of the five things I look for is clarity
of writing – from the simple argument that confused writing is a sign of a
confused mind. Authors who rely on abstract language have allowed the language
to take over their thinking.

A
second thing I look for are signs that the author is able and willing to
classify other specialists according to the different perspectives they bring –
and generous in his attributions…

I’ve
just come across an excellent example of what I mean – from the Michael
Robert’s blog The
Next Recession who starts his latest post with a great name-check on the
Keynesian economists who dominate leftist discussions there days -

Keynes
is the economic hero of those wanting to change the world; to end poverty,
inequality and continual losses of incomes and jobs in recurrent crises.
And yet anybody who has read the posts on my blog knows
that Keynesian economic analysis
is faulty, empirically doubtful and its policy prescriptions to
right the wrongs of capitalism have proved to be failures.

In
the US, the great gurus of opposition to the neoliberal theories of Chicago
school of economics and the policies of Republican politicians are Keynesians Paul Krugman, Larry Summers
and Joseph Stiglitz or slightly more
radical Dean Baker or James Galbraith. In the UK, the leftish leaders of the
Labour party around Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, self-proclaimed
socialists, look to Keynesian economists like Martin Wolf, Ann Pettifor or
Simon Wren Lewis for their policy ideas and analysis. They bring them
onto their advisory councils and seminars. In Europe, the likes of Thomas Piketty rule.

Those
graduate students and lecturers involved in Rethinking Economics, an
international attempt to change the teaching and ideas away from
neoclassical theory, are led by Keynesian authors like James Kwak
or post-Keynesians like Steve Keen, or Victoria Chick or Frances Coppola.
Kwak, for example, has a new book called Economism, which argues that the
economic faultline in capitalism is rising inequality and the failure of
mainstream economics is in not recognising this. Again the idea that
inequality is the enemy, not capitalism as such, exudes from the Keynesians and
post-Keynesians like Stiglitz, Kwak, Piketty or Stockhammer, and dominates
the media and the labour movement. This is not to deny the ugly importance of rising
inequality, but to show that a Marxist view of this does not circulate.

Indeed,
when the media wants to be daring and radical, publicity is heaped on new books
from Keynesians or post-Keynesian authors, but not Marxists. For example, Ann
Pettifor of Prime Economics has written a new book, The Production of
Money, in which she tells us that “money is nothing
more than a promise to pay” and that as “we’re creating money all the
time by making these promises”, money is infinite and not limited in its
production, so society can print as much of its as it likes in order to invest
in its social choices without any detrimental economic consequences. And
through the Keynesian multiplier effect, incomes and jobs can expand.
And “it makes no difference where the government invests its money, if
doing so creates employment”. The only issue is to keep the cost of
money, interest rates as low as possible, to ensure the expansion of money (or
is it credit?) to drive the capitalist economy forward. Thus there is no
need for any change in the mode of production for profit, just take control of
the money machine to ensure an infinite flow of money and all will be well.

Ironically,
at the same time, leading post-Keynesian Steve Keen gets ready to deliver a new book advocating
the control of debt or
credit as the way to avoid crises. Take your pick: more
credit money or less credit. Either way, the Keynesians drive the
economic narrative with an analysis that reckons only the finance sector is the
causal force in disrupting capitalism.

So
why, Roberts asks, do Keynesian ideas continue to dominate? Here he brings in Geoff Mann - director of the Centre for
Global Political Economy at Simon Fraser University, Canada and his new book,
entitled In the Long Run We are all Dead which
argues that Keynes rules .

…….because
he offers a third way between socialist revolution and barbarism, i.e. the end
of civilisation as we (actually the bourgeois like Keynes) know it. In
the 1920s and 1930s, Keynes feared that the ‘civilised world’ faced Marxist
revolution or fascist dictatorship. But socialism as an alternative to
the capitalism of the Great Depression could well bring down ‘civilisation’,
delivering instead ‘barbarism’ – the end of a better world, the collapse
of technology and the rule of law, more wars etc.

So
he aimed to offer the hope that, through some modest fixing of ‘liberal
capitalism’, it would be possible to make capitalism work without the need for
socialist revolution. There would no need to go where the angels of
‘civilisation’ fear to tread. That was the Keynesian narrative.This
appealed (and still appeals) to the leaders of the labour movement and
‘liberals’ wanting change. Revolution was risky and we could all go down
with it. Mann: “the Left wants democracy without populism, it wants
transformational politics without the risks of transformation; it wants
revolution without revolutionaries”. (p21).

Sunday, March 26, 2017

I’m
a great fan of diagrams – apart from giving us a breathing space from text, they
show that the writer is aware that we all operate with very different
types of understanding. hAnd - even more than the act of writing itself - the
process of designing a diagram will quickly throw up the flaws in your
thinking…….

Six
categories form the heart of the two diagrams from the Commons
Transition people I referred to yesterday - I liked the selection of the worlds of “work”,
“citizens” and “conscience” as key categories – we all behave differently in
these spheres……and I understood the “politics” and “economy” labels – we have
various assumptions and expectations in those fields….

It
was the sixth category however – of “consumption/production” which utterly
confused me. What exactly is it – and how does it differ from “economy” and
“work”?? And why are “workers’ cooperatives” not included in the “economy”
category (and “social enterprise” included not there but in “work”??)

There
were actually two diagrams – one purporting to illustrate the “present
capitalist paradigm”, the second “Beyond Capitalism” and containing
illustrative names……

The
first diagram, however, was also bereft of such illustrations and I therefore
offered a simpler
version of the diagram which included the names of writers I considered
offered useful examples of the schools indicated (with appropriate hyperlinks)….

I
readily concede that the names selected probably said more about the world of
an ageing (male) Brit than anything else – even so, of the 23 names selected,
only five are actually English.

I
do, however, have to confess that all but two are male (although I generally
quote people like Susan Strange and Susan George).

Let me introduce this
exemplary group – in future posts I hope to say more about those who have
written critically in the past 50 odd years about the economic and political
system which has us in its grip…… I start at the top
left corner of the diagramwith some key names in the increasingly critical debate about the health of our democracies........

Sheldon Wolin was one of
America’s most distinguished political scientists – producing in 1960 one of
the most lucid and inviting political textbooks “Politics and Vision” (700pp). As a
student of politics between 1960-64, it was his book (and Bernard Crick’s “In
Defence of Politics”) which inspired me to pursue politics as a vocation……

Peter Mair was a highly
respected Irish political scientist who died at the height of his powers at the
age of 60 and is renowned for Ruling the Void – the
hollowing of Western Democracy (2013) which encapsulated
the increasing despair of serious political scientists about the post 2000 trajectory
of democracy.

Robert Michels started the
critique a hundred years earlier with his “ Political
Parties – a sociological study of the oligarchical tendencies of modern
democracy” first produced in German in 1911.

Wolfgang
Streeck is a German sociologist who has produced a series of powerfully-written
critiques of the modern economy, culminating in How will Capitalism End?

David
Harvey is an English Marxist geographer who has been based in the States for
the past few decades; and become famous for his courses on Marxism and
capitalism. One of his most powerful books is A Brief History of Neo Liberalism (2005)

Barbara Ehrenreich is an American
journalist who has famously worked undercover to bring to readers her
experiences of just how grim working life can be eg “Nickel and Dimed”

Joseph
Stiglitz was the World Bank’s Chief Economist until his challenges of its
Orthodoxy proved too much for them to bear. Globalisation and its
Discontents (2002) is one of the many trenchant books he has
written to expose the emptiness of economics orthodoxy….

John Michael Greer
is
an American writer and one of the most prominent of what might be called the apocalypicists – who consider
that the western world is on a “Long (if slow) Descent” to a simpler world…I’m
using the word in a respectful way since a lot of their arguments are
convincing – and Greer’s analysis of American politics is the most profound
I’ve seen.

Edward Snowden is the whistle-blower
par excellence – working for a CIA sub-contractor he unearthed and spilled the
story of the scale of American hacking of private accounts…

Julian Assange is an
Australian computer expert, publisher and activist who has been holed up in
London’s Ecuador Embassy since 2102 for fear of extradition to the US for
“trumped-up” charges by the Swedish authorities….

Saturday, March 25, 2017

The
left-right scale has a long history – the left label coming in the 20th century to designate people on the basis of their
attitude to the economic role which the state should play in society. Since,
however, the late 50s and the arrival of a more “self-expressive” spirit, an
additional dimension was needed to indicate attitudes to the
hierarchy/participation dimension (ie political power). The political compass website
– which allows you to take your own test – labels these additional dimensions
“left authoritarian” and “left libertarian”

Last year I
came across a
couple of diagrams from the Commons Transition people which I found very
useful correctives to the normal simplifications we get about what is going in
the world….

It uses six
dimensions – which it labels “politics”, “the economy”, “work”, “citizens”, “conscience”
and “consumption” to identify a dozen key
concerns which have surfaced about recent global trends. We can certainly quibble
about the logic of the dimensions - and the labels used for the trends - but
the diagrams are thought-provoking and worthy of more discussion than they seem
to have obtained in the couple of years they have been available.

The first of
the diagrams details the “Current
Capitalist Paradigm” but, for my money, could be improved by adding some
names of illustrative writers. I have therefore taken the liberty of producing
a simpler
version of the diagram which includes about 20 names – with hyperlinks in
each case to key texts. Readers who are frustrated by the tiny lettering of the names around the perimeter should therefore simply click on the link(NOT the diagram above) and then click the particular name whose material they want to access.

The second
diagram is entitled Beyond
Capitalism and does include illustrative names. This too could, in my view,
do with some additions (and deletions) and I hope to include an amended version
in a future post.

For example,
it is a bit light on robotisation…..

For the
moment, however, let me simply offer my readers the diagrams as a better way of
mapping the literature to which we should be paying attention….. NOTE - this is the first part of what will be a series of posts focusing on these diagrams

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

I’ve
set myself a rather challenging task – to
sift through the 200 plus books which have popped up on my blogposts over
the past eight years which relate to what we, rather egocentrically, call “the global
crisis”; and to identify those which I
would recommend to those members of the younger generation struggling tomake sense of the mess….

It’s
challenging because I’m finding that I was too hasty in my reading the first
time round – or, if I’m totally frank, that I was too lazy or distracted to do
much more than flick the pages….But a trawl like this offers the great
advantage of ……."compare and contrast"…Plus .....I now know (or think I know!) what
I’m looking for. A previous post set out some of the prerequisites
I now look for in any book and, the more I skim the material I’ve
collected, the more ruthless I feel about exploring
the question of whether a book has the qualities required to change the way
the reader looks at the world…..

Bear
in mind that I bring to the task no fewer than 60 years of quite intensive reading while trying to make sense of (those bits of) the world (I feel I should be making
an effort to understand)…..When we do these lists of the century’s “key books”,
I often wonder how many the compilers have included from a sense of duty –
rather than from a sense of its felt impact…..And
so I did a little test – I asked myself which books had actually so impressed me that I had given them as presents to others or used in my project work of the past 25 years …..The common factor in the resulting list was "typologies" - the books all had a way of simplifying the complexity which faces us...

Susan
George in “The
Lugano Report – on preserving capitalism in the 21st century” (1999)
– a powerful critique in the form of a
spoof report produced by consultants for the global elite

Strongly
recommend the new Introduction she wrote – accessible on the googlebook link

In
one of my blogs I referred to the pleasures of lists – the Seven
Deadly Sins; Seven Habits of Effective People (Covey); Ten
Commandments (God); and Ten rules for stifling
innovation (Kanter) seem just about manageable. When I was working in
Central Europe in the 1990s I used to buy multiple copies of the Covey book in
the local language - Hungarian, Slovak and Romanian – since it was one of the
few books I knew in English which was also available in the local language and
was useful as a means of professional conversation. I know that the book is rather frowned upon in intellectual circles but I still think it's got something.....including the famous sketch of a woman which demonstrates so powerfully our disparate perceptions.....The principles were/are -
- be proactive
- begin with the end in mind
- put first things first
- think win/win
- seek first to understand : then to be understood
- synergise
- "sharpen the saw" - ie keep mentally and physically fit

When I moved to Central Asia and Caucasus in 1999, I found that presentation of
Rosabeth Kanter’s “Ten rules for stifling innovation” was a
marvellous way to liven up a workshop with middle-ranking officials. She
had concocted this prescription as a satiric comment on the way she discovered
from her research that senior executives in US commercial giants like IBM,
General Motors were continuing to act in the old centralised ways despite
changed structures and rhetoric.

1. regard any new idea from below with suspicion - because it's new,
and it's from below
2. insist that people who need your approval to act first go through several
other layers of management to get their signatures
3. Ask departments or individuals to challenge and criticise each other's
proposals (That saves you the job of deciding : you just pick the survivor)
4. Express your criticisms freely - and withhold your praise (that keeps people
on their toes). Let them know they can be fired at any time
5. Treat identification of problems as signs of failure, to discourage people
from letting you know when something in their area is not working
6. Control everything carefully. Make sure people count anything that can be
counted, frequently.
7. Make decisions to reorganise or change policies in secret, and spring them
on people unexpectedly (that also keeps them on their toes)
8. Make sure that requests for information are fully justified, and make sure
that it is not given to managers freely
9. Assign to lower-level managers, in the name of delegation and participation,
responsibility for figuring out how to cut back, lay off, move around, or
otherwise implement threatening decisions you have made. And get them to do it
quickly.
10. And above all, never forget that you, the higher-ups, already know
everything important about this business.
“Any of this strike you as similar?” I would cheekily ask my Uzbek and Azeri
officials.

Robert
Greene’s 24 ways to seduce; 33 ways to conduct war; and 48 Laws of power are,
also, tongue in cheek. The first to hit the market was the 48 Laws of
power and I enjoyed partly because it so thoroughly challenged in its
spirit the gung-ho (and unrealistic) naivety of the preaching which
characterised so many of the management books of the time – and partly for the
way historical examples are woven into the text. I’ve selected a few to give
the reader a sense of the spirit of the book
• Never put too much trust in friends; learn how to use enemies
• Conceal your intentions
• always say less than necessary
• Guard your reputation with your life
• Court attention at all costs
• Get others to do the work, but always take the credit
• Make other people come to you
• Win through your actions, never through argument
• Use selective honesty and generosity to disarm your victims

I found a Russian translation of the book in Baku and gave it as a leaving gift
to the Azeri lawyer in the Presidential Office with whom I had worked closely
for 2 years on the project to help implement the Civil Service Law. He obviouly
made good use of it as 3 months later he was appointed as Head(Ministerial
level)of the new Civil Service Agency my work had helped inspire!

Luther’s
95 theses on the wall of the Wittenberg church may seem excessive – but, given
the success of his mission, perhaps contain a lesson for the media advisers who
tell us that the public can absorb a limited number of messages only!

Sarah Bakewell suggests in How to
Live – or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty attempts at an Answer
that Montaigne’s life can usefully be encapsulated in 20 injunctions –
• Don’t worry about death
• Read a lot, forget most of it – and be slow-witted
• Survive love and loss
• Use little tricks
• Question everything
• Keep a private room behind the shop
• Be convivial; live with others
• Wake from the sleep of habit
• Do something no one has done before
• Do a good job – but not too good a job
• Reflect on everything; regret nothing
• Give up control

At the very least, when I see such lists, it suggests we're in for some fun!

About Me

Can be contacted at bakuron2003@yahoo.co.uk
Political refugee from Thatcher's Britain (or rather Scotland) who has been on the move since 1991. First in central Europe - then from 1999 Central Asia and Caucasus. Working on EU projects - related to building capacity of local and central government. Home base is an old house in the Carpathian mountains and Sofia

about the blog

Writing in my field is done by academics - and gives little help to individuals who are struggling to survive in or change public bureaucracies. Or else it is propoganda drafted by consultants and officials trying to talk up their reforms. And most of it covers work at a national level - whereas most of the worthwhile effort is at a more local level. The restless search for the new dishonours the work we have done in the past. As Zeldin once said - "To have a new vision of the future it is first necessary to have new vision of the past".I therefore started this blog to try to make sense of the organisational endeavours I've been involved in; to see if there are any lessons which can be passed on; to restore a bit of institutional memory and social history - particularly in the endeavour of what used to be known as "social justice". My generation believed that political activity could improve things - that belief is now dead and that cynicism threatens civilisationI also read a lot and wanted to pass on the results of this to those who have neither the time or inclination -as well as my love of painting, particularly the realist 20th century schools of Bulgaria and Belgium.A final motive for the blog is more complicated - and has to do with life and family. Why are we here? What have we done with our life? What is important to us? Not just professional knowledge - but what used to be known, rather sexistically, as "wine, women and song" - for me now in the autumn of my life as wine, books and art....

quotes

“I will act as if what I do makes a difference”
William James 1890.

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas"
JM Keynes (1935)

"We've spent half a century arguing over management methods. If there are solutions to our confusions over government, they lie in democratic not management processes"
JR Saul (1992)

"There are four sorts of worthwhile learning - learning about · oneself
· learning about things
· learning how others see us
· learning how we see others"
E. Schumacher (author of "Small is Beautiful" (1973) and Guide for the Perplexed (1977))

"The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."
Bertrand Russell, 1950

Followers

der arme Dichter (Carl Spitzweg)

my alter ego

the other site

In 2008 I set up a website in the (vain) hope of developing a dialogue around issues of public administration reform - particularly in transition countries where I have been living and working for the past 26 years. The site is www.freewebs.com/publicadminreform and contains the major papers I have written over the years about my attempts to reform various public organisations in the various roles which I've had - politician; academic/trainer; consultant.